New Horizons in Science

By now, biologists know that you need to do much more than map genes to proteins to decipher the evidence of evolution written in the genome. When species adapt and diverge, much of the action actually take place in non-coding, regulatory regions of chromosomes. Regulatory genes and coding genes together form networks with complex feedbacks; mutations in non-coding regions can have cascading effects and even drive creation of new species. Greg Wray was among the first biologists to insist that regulatory regions play a crucial role in evolution.   more…

Today, soldiers routinely survive massive wounds that once would have been fatal. But they’re often left with body parts that cannot function. Elizabeth Loboa is determined to use tissue engineering to restore function to limbs disabled by complex, gaping wounds.   more…

In the 1990s industrial-scale hog farming exploded across Eastern North Carolina, a high-poverty and environmentally sensitive region, making the state the second-largest pork producer in the country. The growth of large hog operations has now been slowed, but the environmental effects persist. For Steve Wing, the region provides a case study in the public-health challenges of poor communities.   more…

The longest outstanding problem of all of physics is dark matter, hypothesized by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 to be the missing mass accounting for the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters. A large body of evidence now indicates that matter as we know it represents only 4% of what the universe is made of, leaving 96% still to be sorted out.   more…

Evolution provides a powerful set of weapons for fighting scourges: controlling the insects and rodents that carry disease and eat crops and trees, for example, or pushing back invasive species. Biologists have tried using “genetic drive”—the introduction of disruptive genes into pest populations—with mixed success. Fred Gould works with farmers, conservationists, public-health workers and others to ensure that principles of evolutionary biology are applied in sophisticated and careful ways in the fight against pests.   more…

After leading the collaboration that searched for the Higgs boson at Fermilab, Mark Kruse gave the Large Hadron Collider about a 50-50 chance of finding the particle that’s believed to imbue the universe with mass. With the July announcement of strong evidence of a new particle, Kruse is embarked with colleagues on the work of determining whether the evidence fits into the Standard Model of particle physics or represents new physics—a more exotic Higgs. The new data, by supporting some predictions and defying others, open up enough new questions to drive decades of further work, he says.   more…

For young women, uterine fibroids can be a source of disabling pain, anemia and infertility. They affect an estimated 70 percent of U.S. women, and are both more widespread and more severe among African-American women. Hysterectomy with early menopause is often the only option doctors can offer. Darlene Taylor and Phyllis Leppert are exploring a nanotechnology solution.   more…

A special second session on dark stars, exotic stars formed by dark-matter annihilation.   more…

Does the brain stay plastic into old age? Can “cognitive training” really help healthy seniors remain independent, even into their 90s? Anne McLaughlin and Maribeth Gandy are using gaming technology to explore these questions. They aim to refine a body of work showing that sustained, challenging cognitive training can help older people reverse mental declines.   more…

Interest in a candidate is booming on Twitter, but the tweets are overwhelmingly negative. An early lead in opinion polls is closing. What's going on? David Rothschild is out to answer that question. Social-media activity generates data that analysts tag for interest and sentiment. The resulting numbers, Rothschild says, are meaningless without full context, just as poll numbers and prediction market data can be misleading unless you correct for known biases.   more…

Photosynthesis is a complex chemical process refined over 2.4 billion years of evolution. Tom Meyer thinks chemists now have the tools to harness the sun’s energy with far simpler chemistry. “I don’t have 2.4 billion years,” Meyer, says “but I’ve got wires and semiconductors.”   more…

Virologist Ralph Baric says future pandemics will be stopped by vaccines engineered to mount a broad defense against pathogens, drawing on genetic information from large phylogenetic pools. He believes the controversy stirred by recent experiments on the H5N1 influenza virus will not be an isolated one. “Basically almost every microbial life form is going to be manipulatable at the genome level within a decade or so,” says Baric.   more…

In the U.S., 5% of the electricity we produce is consumed by our water and wastewater infrastructure. The high cost of the energy needed to treat wastewater is one reason that 2 billion people in the world lack adequate sanitation. What if you could use the bacteria in farm, industrial or domestic effluents to create energy? Bruce Logan says this idea is no pipedream.   more…

Imagine being able to mix up a bit of soy milk and swallow it for protection against a diarrheal disease, a food allergy or an autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis. This is the goal of an unusual project headed by two unlikely collaborators: a plant biologist named Ken Piller and an immunologist named Ken Bost.   more…

With the arrival of the Curiosity rover, a new phase begins in the study of Mars—one that includes a variety of geologists and climate scientists more accustomed to working on our own blue planet. Linda Kah has spent her career studying the earth’s deep past in locations as far-flung as the Canadian Arctic and the deserts of West Africa.   more…

A prolific chemist and inventor, Joe DeSimone wondered whether the manufacturing techniques that have given us cheap and ubiquitous electronics might have a use in medicine. The answer is yes. DeSimone has invented a roll-to-roll method for customized manufacturing of micro- and nanoparticles for pharmaceutical use.   more…

Miguel Nicolelis is a neuroscientist best known for his work in neuroprosthetics, tapping signals from “neural ensembles” to control robotic limbs that may be half a planet away. In experiments with monkeys, he has shown that the brain can learn to think of an electronic appendage as its own; his subjects watch a virtual robotic limb respond to mental commands and incorporate the visual and sensory feedback into their thoughts, getting better and better at controlling the avatar limb merely by thought.   more…

The damaging effects of airborne lead on children's brain development were documented some four decades ago. But lead, banned in vehicle fuels since the 1970s, may not be the only component of traffic-related pollution that threatens the healthy development of young brains. Investigators in an environmental health center in New York City found that high prenatal exposure to airborne PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) is correlated with developmental delays and behavior problems among children. Children with high prenatal exposure to PAHs had significantly lower scores on a commonly used test for cognitive development at age 3, and they were more likely to be developmentally delayed and have lower IQ scores at age 5. The children also showed symptoms of anxiousness, depression and attention deficits. Kimberly Gray is a director of a national network of children's environmental health research centers that is now mobilizing to continue this work and devise prevention strategies.   more…

Research projects such as the Framingham Heart Study and Nurses’ Health Study, by tracking subjects over decades, have provided a wealth of surprising insight into human health. Now, by following more than 1,000 babies born in a New Zealand town in 1972-73 through their lives, Terrie Moffitt and her collaborators have begun to elucidate the links between childhood experience, crime, stress, premature aging, chronic illness, psychiatric illness, substance abuse and many other maladies of human life.   more…

After cosmologists account for ordinary matter and dark matter, what’s left is... dark energy, which appears to make up 72% of the universe. Astronomer Andy Howell, who collaborated with one of the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, studies thermonuclear supernovae as a source of measurements of dark energy. Some of these are caused by “zombie stars,” white dwarf stars that suck matter from companion stars, roar back to life and explode. He’s helping to build a new global robotic network of telescopes to study supernovae and find extrasolar planets.   more…